“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
George Bernard Shaw
On November 13, 2007, clampe submitted a write up, Reactions from Clampe's students, detailing a lesson plan he had prepared for his class with the objective of determining what a new user experience is like on Everything2. He also remarked that by looking at the server numbers that, at this time we, Everything2.com, are “getting about 1 out of 1000 new users to stick around”. clampe acknowledged that his study group had a week to learn E2, they had to have three write ups survive and recognized that it is probably too short a time. He also asked us where do we want Everything2 to go?
We don't know how many students met the objective of having three write ups survive and he sums up his results of what their experiences were by observing that this group of new users 'interpret downvotes as worst cases, sometimes messages are helpful and sometimes they are overwhelming, new users are seeing mixed messages and that the FAQ is overwhelming.'
Finally he hoped this would start a discussion.
In the November 14, 2007 day logs I initiated a conversation through the everyone account with the noderbase. It was a response to clampe's desire to have a discussion because he does a lot to support E2 behind the scenes. My objective was to try to answer his question by looking at where we want E2 to go from several perspectives. Here is a summary of our thoughts.
Generally speaking we agreed with clampe's study group of students in that we think the overriding obstacles for new users are the messaging systems and FAQs. More specifically we think E2 should go where it has always gone and also we don't know. We want it to go Forward, we want E2 to survive and admit that new users are essential for that. We think that our standards are too high, the learning curve too steep, and the "game" portion of the website is rigged to reward inactivity. And we would like to reexamine and tinker with the XP system.
We would like E2 to go to Denny's and then The Morrigan's in the honch in Yokosuka because we are starving, and we can be loaded in two hours if Ami-chan is working. We also feel our breath is being wasted even trying to talk about it.
We don't feel read or feel part of the community. We want better feedback mechanisms. We would like to join the rest of the internet in a bigger way by putting Digg and Reddit buttons everywhere. We want to keep writing for the database, noding for the ages, but we also want to be contemporary, we want to be a place where any surfer on any day can stop in and get relevant and current information or humor.
We are tired of doing all this every six months, we want a clearinghouse for proposed changes. We think e2 is stagnating while other sites are flourishing and if we find a way to make things a bit more open it will hurt the signal to noise ratio we currently enjoy, but dammit, at least we'll have some more actual signal as well. We are like a hipster supplement to Wikipedia, rounding out research with the snarkiness and wit that this place has always had. We think that if E2 disappeared tomorrow forever, we wouldn't miss it and we want growth, but at a moderate pace.
There is an administrative discussion because we do, as noders and as a group of editors, take our role in everything2 seriously. Like the rest of the noderbase our take on the topic varies widely and is unique to each perspective.
In general the editors agree with the study group and with the noderbase response to the day log survey. We said that everyone thought it was confusing. We don't need more bodies. We need more NODERS. Our interface is nigh-impenetrable. Our FAQ is often unhelpful. We don't market our strengths, HTML formatting is an obstacle and TinyMCE is maddening to use. There is no question that E2 is an inbred little elitist club and some of us like it like this way. We throw up a block wall to the talented users and we would like to attract and keep them by hiring a coder. We are also taken aback by whiners who are too lazy to figure out the interface and simple HTML.
Here is a summary of our thoughts from the public catbox and my private inbox. We think the noderbase survey is a circle jerk, we think the questionnaire is going to misfire and we think that C!ing every response to the survey is causing us to overlook the better write ups. We are thinking about creating a tutorial and we are thinking of getting rid of Klaproth. We also wish more people would answer that questionnaire - that is, non-CE people. We want us to look at the apathy and negativity in the answers and finally that we are disenfranchised with some of the "establishment" and we are also thankful for those who care deeply and permanently about e2's new and old users.
Some ongoing actions to our reactions are Two-word poems, Two-word action movie's, a Proposal To Revamp The XP / Level System and the creation of a user account, Virgil to facilitate communication about the E2 FAQ in a couple of months.
G. K. Chesterton once said that George Bernard Shaw is like the Venus de Milo; all that there is of him is admirable.